Fan Film Review: There’s A Lot Of Love In ‘Star Trek: First Frontier’
Lots of photos. https://trekmovie.com/2020/10/27/fan-film-review-theres-a-lot-of-love-in-star-trek-first-frontier/
Star Trek: First Frontier is an ambitious, full-length, fan-produced film focusing on Robert April, the first captain of the original USS Enterprise. The fan film, with over 900,000 views on YouTube since it was released month, strikes many of the notes that made Star Trek: The Original Series so special. And even though Star Trek: First Frontier is not exactly a bases-loaded home run, it swings for the fences with such gusto— including building an 11-foot model of the USS Enterprise for visual effects shots—that it’s impossible not to love. This production was not crowdfunded, but it still breaks many of the fan film guidelines set out by CBS in recent years. However, as its principal photography was all completed before the guidelines were set in place, the team behind it hopes that the movie is “grandfathered” in as a result.
But April is pressed back into service by a series of attacks by the mysterious alien race, the Sa’ryn: bug-eyed, ’50s sci-fi-style monsters whose only motivation is destruction. “They have evolved to be cruel,” one character explains. “To become more vicious, to terrorize. That is what they do.” The Sa’ryn have been awakened from hibernation by Starfleet explorers and have taken some officers captive, including April’s sister. April is enlisted to take the newly built Enterprise out to find and rescue the hostages and to figure out how to stop the Sa’ryn’s deadly rampage through the galaxy.
The costumes are superb, looking like a gentle upgrade to the uniforms from “The Cage” and “Where No Man Has Gone Before” without being a complete redesign. The sets are convincing, for the most part duplicating the pilot-era Enterprise interiors in excellent detail. The cinematography is solid with the exception of a few out-of-focus patches, taking a cue from Jerry Finnerman’s iconic imagery from TOS but dialing down some of the colors to suit a more modern palette. The score is borrowed directly from James Horner’s compositions for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which at points seems to handcuff the action, as though the film was shot and cut to match the existing score rather than the other way around.
Some of the effects shots are fantastic. The 11-foot Enterprise model looks gorgeous, and even when Smith had to fall back on digital effects to speed up the production, many of the CG elements are quite convincing. In other spots, the film betrays its made-on-a-shoestring budget, with most of the matte effects feeling quite rough. There are a number of awkward edits, and at times characters and ships show up in places with little explanation, and April seems to make the same realization several times during a short stretch of story. The sound mix is annoyingly distracting, with the music and sound effects at times so overwhelming that you can’t hear the dialogue at all.